Mensa Otabil - God's Validation
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We’re in Genesis chapter 12, and this is verse number three: «I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.»
God undertook to validate Abraham. He promised to stand by Abraham and treat people as they treated Abraham. He had called Abraham from his father’s house and had taken Abraham to a place that He said He would show him. In the process, Abraham was going to be walking in the wilderness and in the desert, and there would be people who would seek to attack him; there would be people who would seek to destroy him. So God says to Abraham, «I’m with you on this journey. I will bless everyone who blesses you, and I will curse everyone who curses you.» So, in essence, God is saying, «I will treat people as they treat you. Whatever people do to you, I take it as if they are doing it to Me.»
So, Abraham, I’m sending you on a journey; I am with you. I will bless those who bless you. Anyone who is nice to Abraham, God will be nice to them, and God will turn around and favor them. I can imagine how the people of Abraham’s time probably caught on to this idea: «Have you noticed, by the way, that if you are nice to Abraham, good things happen to you? If you are kind to Abraham, things begin to work for you.» There would probably be a long line of people trying to be nice to Abraham because they realized that if you are nice to Abraham, things go well for you. They probably didn’t know God was the one doing it, but they just knew that if you’re nice to Abraham, things will work out well for you. That was the blessing that God put on Abraham-that anybody who was nice to Abraham would have nice things happen to them. May you walk in that same Abrahamic blessing!
And then God said the opposite. He says, «If people mess with you, I will mess with them. If people curse you, I will curse them.» In other words, anyone who acted negatively toward Abraham had bad things happen to them. If you fought Abraham, then God will fight you. If you conspired against Abraham, then God will rise up to disturb your plans. If you decided that Abraham would not do well, you would not do well. That was the blessing that God had put on Abraham.
Why did God do that for Abraham? It was to protect him as he pursued the purposes of God. Because anytime you decide to do the will of God, there will be people who wouldn’t like it, and they want to stop you. They want to disturb the plans, and they want bad things to happen to you. But be assured, if you’re on God’s mission, if you’re obeying God and walking in obedience, then God has your back. He will protect you by treating those who treat you well with blessings and those who try to disturb your life; God will disturb their lives.
And then God said to Abraham, «In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.» In other words, for now, you seem to be like a small guy in a small area, but very soon, the entire world is going to be impacted by you. And hasn’t God fulfilled that promise to Abraham? The descendants of Abraham, both natural and spiritual descendants, have blessed the entire world. In every nation of this world, there is somebody connected to Abraham. That promise of God has been fulfilled. God is a faithful God; He’s a protector and a deliverer for all. For all of us who are born-again believers, we are children of Abraham, and this promise is to us also.
So may the Lord bless those who bless you, and may the Lord not bless those who don’t bless you. Let’s pray: Say with me, «Heavenly Father, make my life a blessing to many others. Make me a blessing to the world. In Jesus' name, amen and amen.»